Questions to ask potential employers
- How long do you expect it would take me to deploy my first change? To become productive? To understand the codebase?
- What's the longest tenure of a developer at this company?
- How long has the top quarter of the developers been here?
- What fraction of the developers have been here less than 6 months?
- How long does it take to do a complete deployment?
- How large are PRs? For a "big" PR, how many lines of code? How long is it open?
- How often do you have major outages? What constitutes a major outage for you?
- Do you have a defined process for the aftermath of an outage?
- About what fraction of their time are developers given (implicitly or explicitly) the freedom to explore?
- How do you define success and growth for your individual developers?
- Do you pay for conferences?
- How do you balance shipping new features and maintaining the codebase?
- How many repositories does an average engineer touch?
- What's the lifecycle of new development, from somebody's idea to deployment?
- How often do 2 devs work together for more than 15 minutes? 3 or more devs?
- How do you like to track tasks?
- Do you do agile/scrum?
- How do you decide what to build?
- What are your swimlanes called?
- How do you know when something is done?
- What project management software do you use?
- How often do you do lunch and learns, or other semi-formal knowledge sharing?
- How often does my manager have 1:1s with their reports?
- What kinds of topics are usually discussed in 1:1s?